Spigit Brings SAAS Social Networking Tool to SMBs

Spigit on Jan. 19 launched WE by Spigit for SMBs of 500 employees or less to work on specific projects within the Spigit construct, which ranks contributors' reputations. Spigit communities are hosted on Spigit's servers and delivered via the Web as a SAAS (software as a service) solution. Spigit rivals include Salesforce.com's Ideas application, as well as other startups such as BrightIdea and SuccessFactors.

Spigit, a startup whose social
networking application helps enterprise employees work together on specific
goals, is moving downstream.
The company Jan. 19 launched WE by Spigit for SMBs of 500
employees or less to work on specific projects within the Spigit construct,
which ranks contributors' reputations. Spigit users create a community and
begin contributing ideas, which are hosted on Spigit's servers and delivered
via the Web as a SAAS (software as a service) solution.

The technology is part of an industry shift by businesses
to use Web-based software that helps employees not only connect but more
efficiently work with one another on important tasks. Such software helps
knowledge workers save the time and resources it would take to find like-minded
individuals to achieve goals.

Spigit employs algorithms to track ideas and assign
users' value scores based on their reputation as judged by participants in an
idea community. The software also assigns points and currency to individuals
based on their reputations.
Contributors can take their currency and dump it into
prediction markets, or buy goods in real stores. Spigit customer AT&T funds
projects forged on Spigit to help move them forward, Spigit CEO and Co-founder
Paul Pluschkell told eWEEK.
"The idea is that by getting people to collaborate
around these topics, you're getting more meaningful data, which is then
recalculated by a million metrics," Pluschkell said. "We moving from
real-time decision making based on historical data to more predictive analysis
with using new fields of input."
Spigit currently sells the enterprise version of its idea
management platform to 3.5 million users at Pfizer, Southwest Airlines and
nearly 100 other companies. Employees use it as an alternative to sharing ideas
and content through e-mail, spreadsheets and other collaboration software.
While these technologies form the crux of
multi-billion-dollar businesses for Microsoft, IBM, Google and a legion of
smaller businesses, they can become unwieldy when so many people are trying to
work together on a knowledge-based project.
Spigit rivals include Salesforce.com's IdeaExchange,
as well as other startups such as BrightIdea and SuccessFactors.
Pluschkell said he realized he needed to create an SMB
offering when he saw that thousands of employees at Spigit's enterprise
customers were using it to form several communities of 500 contributors or
less.
However, while many companies take enterprise-grade
products and pare the feature functionality to sell them to customers at lower
price points, Pluschkell said WE employs the same features and analytics the
company offers in its enterprise version.
Pricing for WE by Spigit starts at $500 per company, per
month for 50 users, scaling to $2,500 for 500 users. That amounts to $6,000 to
$30,000 per year
Spigit launched in 2007 and has banked $14 million in funding and employs 40
people.